That's an good point, Adam. The need to document a patch depends on how you
use your synth. I didn't mention before why I want to document my patches.
It is because I may never do any recording at all. It may be that if anyone
besides myself is ever to hear my compositions (if that is even the right
word), they will have to hear them live. My approach is exporatory. What I
seek to capture and document is the patches and general methods I discover
to create sounds I find interesting. I don't have specific ideas starting
out, but only general ones about what might be interesting. I don't
consider this lack of specific ideas to be a problem. Once I find something
interesting, I hope to record the patch with some jotted notes about it, so
that at some point I could get near again to that general result. I am
fully aware that getting back to a very specific result is sometimes
impossible, given the nature of the dependencies on all the variables of pot
settings, chance timings and so forth. And that that is exactly why
recording is so important to many synthesists. But it is not my objective.
I expect that each time I go back to a patch it will be a little different,
and that is okay. It will be fresh. It's actually what I want. I am not
trying to "realize" an idea by composing, or to be capable of reproducing
anything with precision. I am more interested in exploring what the
synthesizer can do and playing with that. I would be doing that in a
performance, too. This is the same approach I followed twenty years ago. I
could ramble on about my influences, but it wouldn't be hard to guess that
one of them is John Cage. It was his mode of performance that most
impressed me when I had the good fortune to see him perform live.
-Richard Brewster
----- Original Message -----
From: "Adam Schabtach" <adam@...>
To: <motm@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2003 4:48 PM
Subject: Re: [motm] How do you document your patches?
> Not meaning to be a name-dropper, but I asked Robert Rich about exactly
this
> topic once, and whether he was troubled by the lack of patch memory in a
> modular synth. He said that it didn't trouble him at all, and "it helps
keep
> things fresh" (if I remember his words correctly).
>
> I don't document my MOTM patches. I decided when I bought my MOTM that I
> wouldn't worry about this. I build a patch with some specific application
in
> mind (or not); I take it apart again when it has served that purpose (or
> not) and I need the machine for something else.
>
> I have plenty of digital synthesizers with complete recall ability. I use
> those if I really expect to use a timbre more than once.
>
> --Adam
>
> --
> Adam Schabtach
> adam@...
> http://www.studionebula.com
>
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